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For a time in the mid-1980s, Molly Ringwald was one of the most famous actresses in America. That wasn’t necessarily what she expected to be, however, when she was a little girl.

“I think initially I imagined that I would be a singer,” Ringwald said in a recent phone conversation from her home in California. “I also had started to act in community theater kind of around the same time and I watched a lot of old Hollywood musicals at that age.”

“I thought being an actor you had to do it all; I sang, I acted, I danced,” she said. “By the time I actually started to do movies, musicals were entirely out of favor and I didn’t see myself being able to be a jazz musician because nobody my age was doing it.”

Now, everyone from Harry Connick Jr. to Diana Krall is singing jazz. For goodness sake, even Rod Stewart is doing it. So why not Molly Ringwald, who began singing with her father’s jazz band when she was 3, long before she rose to fame in the teen films of John Hughes?

“I kind of bought into this idea that you could only do one thing,” Ringwald said, “which now I don’t believe at all.”

So three decades after she starred in “The Breakfast Club,” “Sixteen Candles” and “Pretty in Pink,” Ringwald is finally scratching that jazz-singer itch. She released an album of jazz songs last spring titled “Except Sometimes,” and swings by the Spruce Peak Performing Arts Center in Stowe for a concert Saturday night.

Ringwald’s movie career cooled off after that run of films in the ‘80s that turned her into a teen icon. She moved to Paris in the early ‘90s and returned to the U.S. a few years later, where she worked as much in theater as she did in film. She married and had children. All through that time, Ringwald said, she dreamed of recording a jazz album.

“I thought about it a lot, the best way to do it,” she said. “I met with various pianists and then usually what would happen is I would get cast in a movie or in a play and I would get focused on something else. Or you would get pregnant. There was always something else that would happen.”

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It was during one of those Broadway productions when she encountered pianist Peter Smith. By the time the play was done with its run, Ringwald was pretty sure she had the right person to help her put together a jazz album.

“You have to be open to it, being available for that, and I think that’s what happened when I met Peter,” she said. “It was something I wanted to do and he just kind of appeared.”

“Except Sometimes” is the result of her collaboration with Smith. The album includes standards by the likes of Hoagy Carmichael and Oscar Hammerstein but ends on a note familiar to fans of Ringwald’s film career: a slowed-down, jazzed-up version of “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” the Simple Minds song that became a hit after its inclusion in the soundtrack to “The Breakfast Club.”

“I never really expected to record it or sing it,” Ringwald said. Hughes died while she was working on “Except Sometimes,” which put him at the forefront of her mind. “It just kind of came together.”

Ringwald said everyone asks if she’ll now sing “Pretty in Pink,” the Psychedelic Furs song associated with the film of the same name. “I’m like, ‘No, I’m not,’” she said.

Ringwald doesn’t spend much time talking about her movie heyday. “I try to distance myself in that I don’t feel like I live in the past. I feel like I have to have respect for the past as well. I’m cognizant of the fact that those movies meant a lot and still do mean a lot to a lot of people,” she said. “I don’t really talk about those movies that much. It’s not really where I’m at right now.”

She does appreciate that her career provides an entrée for her film fans into the world of jazz. She mentioned a show in Tennessee where she asked listeners to tell her who performed the song “Don’t Explain.” She said she usually hears the names of Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Etta James or the song’s creator, Billie Holiday. In this case, Ringwald said, she heard nothing.

“I was like, ‘Oh, come on, don’t say Taylor Swift,’” she said. But it made her realize hardly anyone in the crowd had been to a concert like hers before.

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“And they loved it. They were like, ‘I never even knew I liked that music,’” Ringwald said. “It kind of makes me an ambassador of jazz.”

She likes surprising people with her songs. “Let’s put it this way. I like surprising people in a good way,” Ringwald said, laughing. “I know that people are automatically skeptical. When you are known for one thing people always want you to do that one thing.” The same skepticism holds true for a singer who turns to acting, Ringwald noted.

“It says something about us as a society, that we automatically go to that ‘Oh, it’s going to be terrible’ place,” she said. “I do that, too. I know people can have that sort of thought.” But she’s happy to change people’s minds.

“It just takes one song,” she said.

Ringwald, who worked for several years until 2013 on the television show “The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” said she enjoys acting. There’s something about music, though, that hits her in a direct way.

“I think singing is just joyful, you know?” she said. “It’s something that I’ve done longer than anything else. It’s something that’s very hard to put into words.”

“It’s almost meditative, something you don’t really have to think about,” Ringwald said of singing. “I don’t think about the technique of it, I just think about the lyrics. It’s just joyful. It’s why birds do it. A lot of birds will just sing because they feel like it, because it feels good.”